WHACKMASTER

I suppose I can once and only once. I'm not going to waste my time arguing with people who were not personally there to witness my take home pay drop 25% thanks to "winning the lottery". Gmafb

I came over as a fairly senior Cptn IN MY AIRTRAN DOMICILE at $174.97/hr. Being that the base was closed by SWA (something that is understandable and purely a business decision) and of course losing 32% of my relative seniority, I now found myself IN MY NEW SWA DOMICILE as a mid-level FO making $132.84 a trip or if we multiply that by 1.149 = $153.63/hr.

While SWA flying is productive (thankfully), I was also flying productive trips out of my old AT domicile. In fact, in the three months prior to transitioning/downgrading I hussled because I knew I would be facing a sizeable pay cut. In those three months I was able to gross 77K.

Combine all of this with the fact that my AirTran B Fund went "poof" and I now had to contribute 10% of my gross to my 401K if I wanted to get the company match (you'd be crazy not to as it's a 100% ROI). Unfortunately, that also meant that 10% was immediately sucked off my gross for essentially every year as a SWA FO because my W2s are consistently 175K-180K, thus to hit my max contribution I needed to keep contributing for the entire year.

If you combine the reduced pay rate along with my B Fund going bu bye and subsequently "having" to contribute 10% of my gross to my 401K, then yes you arrive at roughly a 25% cut in take home pay give or take a few percent. I should know. I was the one getting the checks.

Now I know someone's going to raise the argument that we at AT only got our new contract with the improved pay rates due to SWA buying us. To which I say......bull$7it. After six years in negotiations and with a high 90s strike vote and participation level, coupled with the fact that we were most likely small enough to get released to self-help by the government.......well, I'm confident that we would have secured those pay rates OR BETTER on our own.

Pragmatically, this was a bad deal for myself and many others in the short to mid-term. In the long term I'm confident that it will be a positive (although I much prefer that one of the Big 3 had bought us instead).

Even the most bitter and irate FAT pilots accept the airline industry for what it is.....mergers, buyouts, downgrades, forloughs, and bankruptcies. What we don't accept is SWAPA & SWA management working in tandem to deliberately **** us out of our seats and seniority. THAT will forever make some of us resentful, and if anyone tries to claim that that exact deliberate and coordinated act didn't happen then they're just insulting my intelligence. Then to further pour salt on the wound, we have here and out on the line those who actually have the gall to tell me and others what a great deal a pay cut, downgrade and a loss of a third of our seniority was. Perhaps in the long run but again, not in the short or mid-term.

I'm done and will not be engaging in further discussion or argument on this thread about this topic. I've done my best to represent and describe my particular circumstances as accurately and best as possible. If some of you are actually arrogant enough to claim to know my take home checks from an AT Cptn to SWA FO better than the person receiving them then there's really no reasoning with you.